Masha Gessen is the author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She also writes for The New Republic, New Statesman, Slate, Vanity Fair and US News and World Report.

It made sense that she would be asked to participate in the Sydney Writer’s Festival in Sydney, Australia.

Masha Gessen is also a gay activist who has been a member of the board of directors for the Moscow LGBT organization Triangle. So it also made sense that they slotted her for a debate titled “Why Get Married When You Can Be Happy?

Evidently, Ms Gessen is not one to mince words. While other gay activists say things like what she said in that debate in private, they go the other way in public discussion.

The party line is that gay marriage is just this little thing that will have no impact on anything. Ms Gessen departed from the party line and served up a heaping plateful of unvarnished truth.

Here’s what she had to say (emphasis mine):

It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist [cheers from the audience].

That causes my brain some trouble. And part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago. I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally….

[After my divorce,] I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three…. And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality. And I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.

These statements have been all over the internet. The question is, what to they really mean?

If they had come from the mouth of a nutcase with no influence (who probably wouldn’t have been engaged in this debate in the first place) then they wouldn’t mean much of anything. Everybody’s got a mouth and most of us say really stupid things from time to time.

However, this statement didn’t come from a nutcase with no influence. It came from a writer who is entrenched in major media outlets and who writes a great deal about LGBT issues, including, presumably, gay marriage.

What that means is that Ms Gessen is not just a person with an opinion. She’s an opinion shaper. She has a lot to do with what people in the world read and thus, how they think about issues like this.

If this is the agenda she’s following, I think it’s reasonable to think that other people in these same media outlets agree with that agenda and are pushing it also. I’ve written before that I think the media is not just in support of gay marriage, it is hard-selling it to us.

I believe that writers like this one, with agendas like this, are part of that process.

Is the secret motivation behind gay marriage a plot to destroy marriage? I’m not sure that matters.

In the final analysis, it might as well be their agenda, since it will be the result of re-writing marriage laws to pretend that there are no differences between gay couples and a man and a woman. This entire movement is based on this absurd lie.

One question that people who think the way Ms Gessen says that she does don’t even try to answer is whether civilization can survive the destruction of home and family and the complete commodification of women’s bodies and of children.

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